Musings of Matt Williams

The Three ‘R’s of DevOps

School days, school days
Dear old Golden Rule days
‘Reading and ‘riting and ‘rithmetic
Taught to the tune of the hick’ry stick
— School Days by Will Cobb and Gus Edwards

It’s that time of year again… back to school. Just like in school where we learned ‘Reading and ‘riting and ‘rithmetic, DevOps has its own three ‘R’s.

*Repeatable*

Processes are documented and may be repeated with known outcomes. Scripting or using tools such as Puppet or Chef enable this.

*Reproducible*

Not only can proper results be reproduced, errors can as well! This ties into Repeatable, but there’s more than just repeatability.

*Reliable*

The system is not fragile or prone to vapours. Monitoring, alerting, and high availability all play a role here. However, you can’t have a truly reliable system without the previous two. Without repeatability and reproducibility we can’t have reliability.

Without school’s three ‘R’s, we can’t succeed in life. Likewise DevOps needs it’s ‘R’s. Practicing them makes us ‘able’.